Begin With An Indefatigable Dream
by Barry Eysman
Summary: In this corner of Deep Dark Autumn, take a walk with me and find the nexus of love most curious--for this is The Twilight Zone


By

Barry Eysman

Begin with an indefatigable dream. Turn it on in the night dark only please. Resurrect a passing boyhood. Dwell not in a territory, but a land of forgetting that is self-destructing right before your mind. Don't ask how total opposites can exist in the same realm. Know the death of one needs the might of the other dying as well.

Set a cameo of late Autumn. Paint of smoky air and crisp cold frost and a jacket held tightly around a chest and back, with its blue denim collar turned up at the neck. Proceed at a walking pace. One of those terminal streets where there was a car junk yard or a nasty bulldog of barking variety who loved to almost pull off the collar/chain and lunge at you little boy, as you ran past the junk yard with the mountains of mashed cars like screaming bodies dying before your ears even in the pitch dark.

Take a man who has need of that indefatigable dream, who wears it in silent Autumn nights, who wants someone to see and do something to him—a pot shot, an upper right to the jaw—but then again, his footsteps shadows on the sidewalk of cracks and broken pavement his feet know by all those years of memory snow covered as it might be, it still exists—but that jaw tonight, or last or any Autumn night, might deflect the upper right, might make the potential of the giver of same think again, hold his ground, walk away, and inside running hard as possible. Down the nightmare street of curvy turn and curve sign effervescent reflector red.

They would not remember him here, were there still anyone to remember, if there ever had been, for the night was a deep sky with no stars and the wind increased and brought promise of snow crystals my morning—turn this way and shelter his eyes against the wind that has put a speck in the left one—hold head down, make a tear, he has a tear duct after all, quite remarkable, wouldn't you say so? —And try with the tip of his finger touch very gently, very tentatively, as all his life has been so tentative, especially the one he is in desperate combat, or is he?, to keep alive—the eye hurts now and he knows it is blood shot, can imagine he can feel the veins getting bulgy and red and hot and making summer sun snap shots of fire in his eye—as he tries to stand and walk with the pain, as with a friend. For pain and lost and horror seemed to be his only friend back there.

But physical pain he could not bear, so he kept his painful eye closed, and hied himself to a curb and fumbled, while half falling as he tumbled down and spread his legs out, as he lowered his head and tried to will more tears out to flush out the cinder or grit, or piece of dead mashed car, or sound of bulldog growling with full menace, turned for a second into an object of tangible, and sit there then the man with the rude face and the hands grown gnarly and the legs bolden and thick and the arms with their masses of muscles, as he listened to an occasional car passing near by, a TV set, CDs, some arguments, in houses near by and far away down the clean limned tunnels of all Novembers leading to this specific one where he came again, every year, time denouement declassified, years tumbled like ice in a glass of rum, which he wished he had some of right at this moment, as the speck brought down Goliath and nothing whistled but the wind.

A cinder from the ancient forever unused train tracks two blocks to the west of here, where, in his childhood, freight trains occasionally ran and would thereby deposit the occasional cinder in his eye if he stood too close. Before he was born, there were passenger trains, as he would try to imagine card shark dandies looking like Maverick, and ladies with finery clothes and pink parasols and big round flowered hats, then time took the images as it had taken the realities. Then no trains, but this night, perhaps, a cinder from then revisiting in his eye. To speak of the past: It was not all pleasant. But some men, those who sit on curbs of a late night in their once-home town, come here now to raggedy one left hotel to spot the child that never was.

To spot the child he had always hoped to be. He was weeping now. To get the cinder out of his eye, his left one, understand. He was strong and worked out twice a week at the gym in the city where he ostensibly lived. Till October came and he packed a suitcase and rushed to the bus station, bought the ticket, and headed on silver propelled by massive tires, and a passive greyhound bolted to the side of the only time machine he had ever known.

Had he come here to frighten this time, someone? Had he wanted to be found out, these last ten years of his ritual? But he was so careful and house lights were now going out and people flicked pink red orange lights on in their bathrooms and bedrooms to go to unconscious madness. Some people love horror. Some people find horror wherever they dwell. It is not an astute kind of horror, nor is it symbolic, but down in the depths, in the pits of dreams, not taken as anything but what it is, and what it is was he was too handsome, too athletic, and too beneath contempt, for what worked for other boys, did not work for him. His hair once brown and long now going gray and losing its texture and itself.

A boy has to know how to carry himself and if that boy likes horror the first moment introduced him to it, advised him to sit down and discover the lineage of it, the symmetry of it, then he had to do that thing. Though his eyes were sky blue, there was a little moment anyone had when they looked into the mildness of them, as he tried to put delicate finger tip flesh to the cinder now and pull it adhesive out, as he sat quietly and now rolled his eyes in circles, trying to get the cinder or speck or whatever nomenclature it fit under, out to an eyelash or up to the top of his eye or the side and wash it down the drainage ditch where the eye fluid goes and from which it is replaced.

Find him with the face, and find him without the face and it would be the same thing. A scowling Dijon and whatever character he had now had gone with the moth eaten face he had tried to take such good care of, had tried to save it from time's endless ravages, and oh how he wanted to ravage time, to show the endless sharecropper of death just how it felt not to have time to get boyhood right or manhood either and trains don't come along anymore. It is not the fanciful daydreams of St. Louis meeting or Maverick western TV shows. It is pound and parcel of what has gone which means it has never been, while pundits on radio and TV flense your mind and heart and leave you ready to kill.

How long he had tried not to do this. Then that first time, then nine more years to now. Not Halloween, grown too cheap and gaudy, but near middle of November and heading into the top of the last fourth now, to play the radio and hear the local D.J. spin the platters and always this time of year, Wilson Pickett and "The Monster Mash" you didn't have long to wait for, there on lover's lane in Dad's old Jalopy with your girl crushed in your arms and smelly sweet gin and Coke fizz on your breath. If you had a girl or a car and if you hadn't spent all you had to send away for it, because it was you, you considered it at nine, you were most certain at 10 and you were one hundred per cent convinced by age 10 and one third.

They made it for him, for it was a special order, but the money he had taken such a long time saving for was worth it by far. There were the years of skin grafts later on and there was the touchstone of back alleys because of it, the doctors being skin merchants of a lower variety who didn't care what you were running from or why, just the green paper was a passport to a life of—yes, of course, but Mac, are you sure? This is from creeps Ville. And a knife convinced him and the patient and the patient had another request, for one face never seen to another face never seen, mask, flesh, and mask, seeming plastic, and the first convincer was how remarkably cold the night air felt to his face, not being bound up to a cardboard container anymore, and he smiled or tried to, and he tried to remember the eye and the cinder, as he pulled the mask from his jacket pocket and could not see those eyes very well at all, which all by itself, made him feel better.

It was good, convincing, no one knew for no one looked as no one ever looked though the calm blue eyes didn't have that moue of terror in the lakeside sky of it, there was just—the lakeside sky of it—and uninteresting and turn-away, which was one of the biggest Coptic jokes of the whole legacy of what attracted and what repelled at the same instant, cause a moment and then caused a lifetime of pain after other persons and other moments, until finally enough saved from this job and that, and the pain was silver screen nightmare and leave the stitches in, please, for it gave him a frisson of more danger, though there would be no danger, still the nonsense of the human mind, especially stoked and twisted on movie curves and those big wide screens in front of big wide eyed children sucking down licorice or slurping cardboard Cokes, all of this played in the movie that was his life, and finally reversed, and the need to pay homage to the fifteen cassettes of it, for fear one or two might be locked, though he was sure to protect them at all times, and to make certain the machine was always in top flight condition and replaced every so often from Wal-Mart. So cheap.

Lost in reverie an unearthly soul that formed him should not be capable of having, with one huge eye bulged out, no other eye but in its place a stygian pit, a face of terrible clawing burn marks and a nose barely there save for a bone stem of it and two huge nostrils, hair singed and gone from the left side, a mouth that was a grotesque mimicry of one, ears gone, burned off in that tragic car crash, the fearsome pale greenness of it all, the huge pinned in dexterity of creeping crawls to a lava pit, the eye huge looking always out in terror as its veins bulged all the time, the stitch marks on the neck, the madness of the thing, the cacophony of a brain part of which stuck out of the broken skull at the back, the wild miasma of an interred corpse that had rage written like the end of anything sane down the runnels of scars and souvenirs of the terrible flames of burning before he was thrown from the car and rescued, all of it sat on a curb.

Sat there like a forlorn child. Crying for the celluloid friends who had long passed this way and never to return again. He had screamed and wept so much during the surgery, the doctor---sure, old geek with smell of booze on his dirty t-shirt and his baggy old stained pants—had begged he take anesthetics, but the patient insisted, and told him to keep drinking during surgery for he had to know what in its way it felt like when the worst fear of his childhood sustained those awful injuries, and why from the first sick gashed moment a child had happened to find the thing that chased him down dream corridors for years was also tragically beautiful. Even when the rummy had gouged out one eye of his patient and had pulled the other out on its strands to leave it hanging, the mad patient had wanted to feel it, every second of it.

And in time it was begun and in time he made another request of the doctor for the skin flensed off the face, for the eye not needed, for a glass eye to match the blue of the other plucked out, and that had seemed the most insane of it all. And the middle aged man on the street curb of his home town stood up now, cold in his denim jacket that covered his letter jacket that covered his muscle shirt and smiled at how a cinder of time could have hurt worse of all the pain that had come before, the screamy love letter he wrote to what he had loved and what he was now. He got to the corner of the curve and the night was colder. He had hours to walk before putting on his always-false face and going back to his hotel room. But for now, the out-of-date, the pathetic form walked onward through the quiet neighborhoods of his once-home town, resisting looking in bedroom windows as his name sake had done, that not being a part of it and he being a coward still and all.

No one saw the Teenage Frankenstein walking in the shadows and remembering that he "had the body of a boy, the face of a monster, the soul of an unearthly thing," not that anyone would care, as he knew, but how it was and always would be, knowing finding consistency can be the most horrific of comforts.


End file.
